Alita: Battle Angel  ★★★

THE James Cameron haters are wrong again.

The mega-successful Canadian film-maker attracts regularly criticism via a section of the internet, despite being responsible for some of the most popular films since the 1980s, including Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens, Titanic and Avatar.

Again the trolls were almost willing Alita: Battle Angel to be a disappointment due to Cameron co-writing the script, even before the film’s 2019 release. The fact it’s reasonably entertaining is bound to annoy them even further.

Japanese Manga is notoriously hard to convert into mainstream Hollywood fare, but co-writers Cameron and Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island) and director Robert Rodriguez certainly give it a good try.

I’m sure the graphic novel series “Gunnm” by Yukito Kishiro, upon which the film is based, is a more intellectual and expansive work. But attracting a wider audience by creating this type of popular film requires some simplification in both presentation and approach.

It’s also hard to the find the right level to pitch the violence and adult themes to a younger audience.

Ultimately I think whether the film succeeds or fails the source material benefits, either becoming more revered or more popular and hopefully both.

Visually the film is interesting to watch but it’s disapponting that the production design and art direction, particularly for the expansive sequences, borrows from many previous films and doesn’t create anything particularly new.

Where it does stand out in terms of craft, however, is the terrific blending of human faces on robotic bodies, particularly during the frenetic action sequences. The cyborg Alita is also an exceptional achievement using motion capture technoques that seamlessly exists within every location and scene.

It’s 2563 and Earth has survived a cataclysmic war known as ‘The Fall’. The planet is divided into three zones. In the air is Zalem, the last of the floating cities where the elite live. Zalem is powered by the surface city, known as Iron City, where the majority of the population lives. Freight from the surface is transported to Zalem via a massive umbilical tube and resulting refuse is constantly dumped back to the ground. Below Iron City is a desolate underworld.

In Iron City, there is a huge trade in spare robotic parts with much of the population having needed one or more of their human limbs replaced at some time in their lives. Bounty hunters supplement meagre incomes by murdering criminals and the biggest game in town is Motorball ( blatant rip-off of the 1975 film Rollerball), which presents the opportunity for its greatest exponent to win a much-coveted life on Zalem.

Two of Iron City’s most interesting and popular inhabitants are cyber-surgeon Dr Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and Motorball boss Vector (Mahershal Ali). Dr Ido is a seemingly kindly soul, a gifted surgeon who is happy to perform repair work on the basis of being paid eventually. Vector is a ruthless businessman with a direct link to Nova, the mysterious ruler of Zalem.

The story kicks off with Dr Ido discovering a cyborg head and torso on Iron City’s rubbish scrap heap that still has some brain function. He rebuilds the robot in the image of his deceased daughter, Alita.

Alita not only turns out to have advanced human qualities but also amazing fighting skills and a streak of steely determination. Revelations of Alita’s past life eventually place her and Dr Ido in direct conflict with Vector and a collection of cyborg bounty-hunters and henchmen.

Other key characters include Hugo, a young man who befriends Alita and Dr Ido’s former wife who is now linked to Vector.

Yes, it does become hard to keep track of what the hell is going on. But Rodriguez, whose best work is still arguably back in the ’90s with El Mariachi, Desperado and From Dusk ’til Dawn,  keeps the pace going with enough interesting visuals or action sequences to keep you distracted.

Pick of the performances is Rosa Salazar whose voice captures the right balance of wonder, emotion and aggression required for Alita to be a close-to-human character.

Yes, the film is certainly flawed, but its also a frequently interesting and engaging sci-fi actioner.